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By DONALD McDONALD
The Spectator Australia p 10, 27.11.2010
What began with tours by visiting UK orchestras in the 1970s has flourished into some enticing prospects for 2011.
The surge of chamber orchestra popularity began to gather in the late 1960s. The first big wave reached our shores in 1972 when the Academy of St Martin in the
Fields and Neville Marriner loured Australia for Musica Viva. We surfed those waves of popularity in the years that followed.
That first Academy tour was a huge sell-out success around the country. With Marriner at the helm, the Academy was the first chamber orchestra to achieve international star status, thanks to their excellent recording skills fully marketed by EMF. The orchestra had a wonderfully evocative name which hinted at Georgian splendours that were there for all to hear.
Other great chamber orchestras followed, including Karl Munchinger and the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, old-fashioned to some ears but with playing that was lush, elegant and affectionate. Authentic or period instruments and style came to Australia with David Munro’s Early Music Consort of London. After Munro’s untimely death, Christopher Hogwood, who had toured with both Marriner and Munro, formed the Academy of Ancient Music which gave its debut performances in Australia and went on to become internationally famous through recordings.
Other significant chamber orchestra tours were made by the Festival Strings of Lucerne under Rudolf Baumgartner and the Warsaw Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra. The highpoint of the authentic style in that period was the 1975 tour by the superb Concentus Musicus of Vienna under its director Nikolaus Harnoncourt. At that stage they had not played outside Europe, so luring them to Australia was quite a coup. The public’s interest in the repertoire for chamber orchestras grew through the 1970s. Indeed, it seemed they couldn’t get enough. During a return lour by the Academy of St Martin in the Fields in 1974, Neville Marriner heard a performance by a chamber orchestra from the NSW Conservatorium which greatly impressed him. We shared with Neville our ambition to have an Australian- based chamber orchestra and he agreed to help launch such a project by conducting the first performances of what became the Australian Chamber Orchestra, initially based on players from the NSW Conservatorium. Those performances took place at the Adelaide Festival in 1976 at the beginning of a national tour. Fast-forward to today and we are in the wonderful but not necessarily predictable situation of Australia having two world class chamber orchestras – the ACO and the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra – which command large audiences and attract remarkable sales and awards for their recordings. Both orchestras have charismatic leaders; Richard Tognetti is approaching his 22nd season as head of the ACO, while at the Brandenburg, Paul Dyer has been Artistic Director since he founded the orchestra in 1989.
Strong leadership is some thing the Australian orchestras share with their European predecessors; indeed, it is an essential characteristic for both the orchestra and the audience. Neville Marriner had a debonair allure, Karl Munchinger hinted at a pre-war sophistication, Christopher Hogwood presented as a movie version of a
Cambridge don, while Nikolaus Harnoncourt was genuinely aristocratic. The imagery really matters, and Tognetti and Dyer have developed their own and that of their orchestras to a high degree. Imagery aside, it is to the immense credit of both of these men, their management and their supporters that they have achieved such high standards and secured unique positions in the cultural landscape of Australia and beyond. It is an outcome we dreamed about in the 1970’s. Both orchestras have announced characteristically inventive seasons for 2011 which will appeal to their respective and numerous audiences. Operating on a uniquely national basis, the Australian Chamber Orchestra will present seven national tours to eight Australian cities, an astounding touring achievement. Richard Tognetti has invited a number of typically unusual and intriguing guest artists to perform a wide-ranging repertoire. Alex Ross of the New Yorker and author of the bestseller The Rest is Noise will ‘curate’ and present two programs of music which he regards as historically important. Swedish clarinet virtuoso Martin Frost will perform a fully-staged theatrical piece The Peacock Tales, which the Times has described as ‘a mixture of Bob Fosse, Marcel Marceau and Michael Jackson’.
Unconventional programming indeed (and not just because all three of the aforenamed
are deceased), it is reminiscent of The Fires of London under Peter Maxwell Davies. Bach and Beethoven are in the seasonal mix along with Teddy Tahu Rhodes. The point is that ACO audiences know to expect the unexpected. On one level, audiences for the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra know rather more what to expect. Lest that sound predictable, it has
been Paul Dyer’s achievement to surprise and delight with music of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries by using original edition scores and vintage instruments so that it sounds freshly composed. In 2011, the Brandenburg will be focused on the 17th century in a season entitled ‘A Brandenburg Guide to Beautiful Places’.
The individual programs have atmospheric names such as ‘The City of Romantic Serenades’ (that’s Naples) featuring an Italian duo of tenor Marco Beasley and harpsichordist Guido Morini. Another program is titled ‘The City of Weeping Women’ to provide a showcase for mezzo-soprano Fiona Campbell singing Handel arias. Another program called ‘The City of Sacred Songs’ will feature Vivaldi, including his Dixit Dominus. These ‘cities’ may not be strictly geographical, but they do promise a journey of discovery.
Unquestionably one of the great joys of hearing these two splendid orchestras now is the availability of appropriate venues for their performances, most notably the City Recital Hall in the centre of Sydney and the Melbourne Recital Centre on Southbank. The availability of these ideal venues was again some thing we could only dream about when this movement began. Australians are likely to be surfing the chamber orchestra wave for quite some time to come.
Donald McDonald was formerly General Manager of Musica Viva Australia.
